Tag: being open

I’m getting worried about Facebook and Google. I worry a bit about their censoring policies. I’m also deciding, slowly but surely, that’s it’s just plain risky to host the bulk of my creative content with one company, behind one single password. My blog is safer.

I also think about my son—he’s 16 months old. So much of what I write—my messages to friends, my notes, my thoughts on things—is online, be it Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. One of my favorite things to do as a kid was rummage through my dad’s library. I’d look at his books and get a sense of what he believed. I’d see old photos of him in college—yearbooks and Kodak frames stuffed in textbooks—that put him in a a different perspective. I’d find letters he’d written to my mom or to his parents that helped me understand who he really was, what he thought about besides me and my brother.

I want my son to have that, too. I want him to be able to see who is dad was, and is, on the inside—what I’m thinking about, what I believe. Of course, I want to tell him these things in person as he grows, but inevitably I will forget to say something, or forget what I once believed, or forget that, once upon a time, I did ask the same questions he’s asking and I did have a hard time deciding the answer. I want him to see where I’ve been, what I’ve done. If not for this blog, the only record of that will be in my password-protected email inbox.

So I want a record. And I want to be open about things—there’s not enough of that around these days.

My goal here isn’t to get as much web traffic as possible. But I do have more to say now, for some reason, than before. I had writers block for several months this year—really since last fall. I was busy. Moved from Virginia to Florida, my business is booming, my wife and I are slowly renovating our home.

That’s all changed, now. I’ll credit that both to settling into my new home and to the church community I’ve found here in Jacksonville. Great preaching, strong community. The whole thing just makes me think a lot more than I had been, at least about things other than work and market research.

I’ll start off with the photo at top. I took that from Mt. Adams in Cincinnati, OH earlier this month. I went to meet with a client. Spent the evening prior walking the city, ultimately climbing back up Mt. Adams (I was there last year, too) to take a photo for my wife. The neighborhood up there is picture-perfect. Old row homes, almost all with a view like this. Quaint, quiet, serene. Walked by a family excitedly reviewing the footprint of their new home, perched on the edge of a cliff with the same view in my picture.

One of the coolest places I’ve been. I highly recommend it. Here’s me at the top: